Violence Prevention – State of Healthhttps://ww2.kqed.org/stateofhealth
KQED Public Media for Northern CATue, 26 Sep 2017 18:58:59 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.2.290498487How an Intervention Program Stops the Revolving Door of Violent Injurieshttps://ww2.kqed.org/news/2016/11/20/how-an-intervention-program-stops-the-revolving-door-of-violent-injuries/
Mon, 21 Nov 2016 19:00:36 +0000https://ww2.kqed.org/stateofhealth/?p=261680Darius Irvin grew up in violent neighborhoods in Oakland and San Francisco. While Irvin was never in a gang, he was around them a lot. One winter when he was back home in Oakland from his freshman year of college up in Chico, he knocked on the door of his Read More …

]]>261680Sonoma County Man Learns to Control Anger and Violencehttps://ww2.kqed.org/stateofhealth/2014/01/06/sonoma-county-man-learns-to-control-anger-and-violence/
https://ww2.kqed.org/stateofhealth/2014/01/06/sonoma-county-man-learns-to-control-anger-and-violence/#respondMon, 06 Jan 2014 18:01:35 +0000http://blogs.kqed.org/stateofhealth/?p=16643Continue reading Sonoma County Man Learns to Control Anger and Violence→]]>Jon Wheeler, 35, struggled with his own abusive behaviors before finding Men Evolving Non-Violently (M.E.N.). The organization has helped the Occidental resident change his behavior and now he leads support groups for other men.

Editor’s Note: Jon Wheeler used to have a difficult time controlling his anger in romantic relationships. As part of our occasional series, “What’s Your Story?” Wheeler shares how a group in Santa Rosa called Men Evolving Non-Violently, or M.E.N., helped him change his abusive behaviors. Now, he leads those same groups, helping other men who struggle with violent behavior.

By Jon Wheeler

I’d be in a relationship with a woman and whatever was going on in the relationship, I would respond to it with anger. Like, I might even tell you in my words that I’m supporting you, but my tone of voice would say, ‘You’re an idiot and I don’t respect you.’ And I’ve been physically violent with a woman a few times in my life. It has come to that.

I felt guilty for my behavior, and I could see the way that I was acting was driving away a person that I was trying to hold close.

I’m the sixth of seven children, and there was a ton of fighting between siblings as a kid. And then my own parents hit me when I was a kid, and (there was) a lot of yelling. Those were the tools that were taught to me for how to deal with things that you don’t like that come up in life.

Seeing my own violent behavior and knowing that I wanted to change it and didn’t know how to do that, I felt terrified that that’s who I am. That I’m a violent man and there’s nothing I can do about it.

My first night with M.E.N., I felt a little bit scared that I was going to try to something and fail at it. Because that was my experience: I wanted to connect with women and I had an experience of failing at that over and over and over again.

I felt ashamed that I needed help. I was scared to be known among batterers. But I really believed in what I was doing and I believed deep down that those who knew what I was doing would respect it and would appreciate my effort to try to be better.

One of the most powerful parts of M.E.N. is that you get to be going through a process that’s shared. That all these guys who were like burly men could sit down and be gentle and be tender with one another and be like totally emotionally vulnerable.

I think the most important part of my journey was when I figured out that I have low self-esteem. Underneath it all is a fear of not being good enough. So, if I’m not good enough and you find someone else better, then I get left alone.

My participation in M.E.N. is an act of liberating myself from everything that held me captive for a couple decades. And now I can be free of that, and I can live with a heart full of love.

Last weekend was an especially violent one, even for Oakland. On Friday, four people were killed, and over the rest of the weekend, 11 people were shot, though not fatally. There were 126 homicides [PDF] in Oakland last year, cementing the city’s distinction as one of California’s more violent urban centers. Oakland certainly doesn’t have a lock on gun violence. Other cities like Stockton are struggling, too. But the situation in Oakland has been going on for some time now, and locals are giving a lot of thought to what it means to live under the constant threat of violence.

As part of KQED’s occasional series, “What’s Your Story,” Oakland native Caheri Gutierrez (pronounced “Carrie”) shares her story about working with at-risk high schools students after she herself was shot in the face as a teenager. Guiterrez is a Violence Prevention Educator for Youth Alive, an Oakland non-profit with a mission to prevent youth violence. Below are excerpts of my conversation with her:

“‘They shot you. They shot you.’ I touched my face and my hand just went inside of my face.”

“I was just in the car and all of a sudden I started to feel like I was getting electrified. It was really intense shocks from the top of my head to the bottom of my feet. The guy that was driving, my friend, starts screaming that he’s been shot.

I reached over to him to try to help his hand and that’s when he looked at me, and he was like, ‘Oh my God, Caheri. It’s you. They shot you. They shot you.’ I touched my face and my hand just went inside of my face.

Five days later, I wake up at Highland Hospital and my hands are tied to the hospital bed. I have tubes coming in and out of my nose and out of my mouth. It was hard.

An x-ray of Caheri Guiterrez's jaw soon after she was admitted to Oakland's Highland Hospital.

Some of my family members are, you know, gang-related, and so is my brother. And I remember my uncle asking my brother, ‘Who did it? Where are they from? What are we going to do? Are we going to get them?’And things like that. I couldn’t talk but I was just like, ‘NO. This cannot happen to anybody else.’

While I was at the hospital I was connected with an intervention specialist. Her name was Tammy Cloud. I got out of the hospital a month later. And Tammy comes to my house and she was like, ‘I think you should come to this program and talk to the high school students about getting shot and how you think about life now.’

Besides my personal story, I teach them a curriculum about violence. It makes me feel like I make a difference. It makes me feel very hopeful because I am a victim to the violence that happens in Oakland. And I’m one of the many victims. And when you talk to someone and you can give them an example of what can happen, I think they really soak that in and they think twice about hanging out with people who are gang-related, or even picking up a gun. Ever since then, honestly, I feel like getting shot happened for a reason.”

We think of the Centers for Disease Control as collecting data on just about everything. But scientists say a lack of funding and political pressure had long prevented them from researching gun violence. And not just the possible causes of violence — but data collection around specific acts of violence.

On Wednesday, the president addressed the need to look for those causes in his proposals to curb gun violence. In a section [PDF] titled “End the Freeze on Gun Violence Research,” the president directs the CDC to research gun violence and also wants Congress to pony up $20 million to expand the national database on violent deaths.

“We don’t benefit from ignorance,” Obama said. “We don’t benefit from not knowing the science from this epidemic of violence.”

From the president’s plan:

… for years, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and other scientific agencies have been barred by Congress from using funds to “advocate or promote gun control,” and some members of Congress have claimed this prohibition also bans the CDC from conducting any research on the causes of gun violence. However, research on gun violence is not advocacy; it is critical public health research that gives all Americans information they need.

“People have been working for years to prevent violence, but it’s like we’re working with blinders on.”

Larry Cohen, executive director of Oakland’s Prevention Institute, called the backing of research “perhaps the most important part” of the President’s proposals.

“People have been working for years to prevent violence, but it’s like we’re working with blinders on, because there are certain very obvious places we’re unable to look,” Cohen said. “Clearly there’s no way to look at the epidemic and not realize that guns are a clear element of homicide, and yet we’re told, ‘don’t look at guns.'”

NBC News quoted scientists who were equally enthusiastic about the president’s plans. From NBC:

(Scientists say) pro-gun advocates — including the National Rifle Association — had choked off funding for CDC firearms research starting in the mid-1990s and imposed a chilling effect on those who dared to pursue it.

“He’s saying this is very important and I’m going to back you on this,” said Dr. Mark Rosenberg, president of the Task Force for Global Health and director of the CDC’s Center for Injury Prevention and Control from 1994 to 1999. “Basically, they’ve been terrorized by the NRA.”

In the 1990s, politicians backed by the NRA attacked researchers for publishing data on firearm research. For good measure, they also went after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for funding the research. According to the NRA, such science is not “legitimate.” To make sure federal agencies got the message, Rep. Jay Dickey (R-Ark.) sponsored an amendment that stripped $2.6 million from the CDC’s budget, the exact amount it had spent on firearms research the previous year.

To be fair, Dickey later recanted and published an opinion piece in the Washington Post, titled “We won’t know the cause of gun violence until we look for it.”

Now researchers will get a better opportunity to look.

]]>https://ww2.kqed.org/stateofhealth/2013/01/16/president-obama-ends-research-freeze-on-gun-violence/feed/09988gun-176(Image: Kaiser Health News)A Public Health Approach to Gun Violencehttps://ww2.kqed.org/stateofhealth/2012/12/21/a-multi-pronged-approach-to-gun-violence/
https://ww2.kqed.org/stateofhealth/2012/12/21/a-multi-pronged-approach-to-gun-violence/#respondFri, 21 Dec 2012 17:34:46 +0000http://blogs.kqed.org/stateofhealth/?p=9666So now we’ve heard from the NRA which asserts that we need to put armed police in every school, then adding, “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.”

It sounds good, but as Josh Sugarmann of the Violence Policy Center said today in a statement, that’s been tried already — and it didn’t work. “There were TWO armed law enforcement agents present at Columbine High School during the assault by Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold that left 15 dead and 23 wounded. They twice engaged and fired at Eric Harris in an effort to stop the shooting, but were unsuccessful because they were outgunned by the assault weapons wielded by the two teens.”

And if you’re thinking that having a gun protects you from guns, think again. After all, Rachel Davis, Managing Director of the Prevention Institute points out, in Newtown, Adam Lanza first killed his mother, a gun enthusiast. “The first victim of this shooting was a gun owner who was not able to stop this from happening,” Davis says. “The problem of guns is they raise the risk of lethality.”

We are a society that craves simple solutions, yet violence is a complex problem. That doesn’t mean nothing can be done. While Davis favors an assault weapons ban, she says that’s only one piece of a comprehensive approach. “Another piece,” she adds, “is addressing mental health needs — that includes access to high quality mental health services, reducing the trauma people are exposed to and then addressing the trauma.”

Mass shootings in Newtown understandably capture widespread media attention, but remember that children are murdered every day by firearms. In 2010, according to CDC numbers, 1,260 children up to age 18 were killed by someone who used a gun. That’s more than three children every day — or 21 children in the week since Newtown.

Davis argues for broad community-based prevention programs. Davis points to “GRYD” — the Gang Reduction Youth Development program which has been in place for several years in Los Angeles. GRYD is multi-pronged. “It’s not one single thing,” Davis says, “but a combination of strategies and efforts that are coordinated in the neighborhoods that are most affected by violence.”

In a profile, the LA Times showed how GRYD also takes at-risk youngsters and not just stops violence but puts kids on a better path:

According to a study by the Urban Institute, since GRYD began operating, gang crimes have fallen by 21.6%, faster than crime overall in the city; in the two years before it opened, they dropped 14.9%. Moreover, GRYD is reaching large numbers of at-risk youngsters: Young people enrolled in the program were 29% less likely to skip class, while those from the same neighborhoods not in the program increased the amount they cut class by 53%.

What all these statistics show is that violence is preventable. “There’s growing evidence for it,” Davis concludes, “but there’s no simple solution for it. We need to put in comprehensive solutions that are working in places around the country.”